The professor

November 08, 2005|By Emily Nunn

There has been a sleeping policeman in the alley behind University of Chicago geography professor Michael Conzen's house in Hyde Park for quite some time now, and a large, messy parrot's nest recently exploded and burst into flames back there, too, causing not just a power outage, but a PCB cleanup operation; the irritating birds returned soon thereafter, and ComEd arrived again, trailed this time by the Greater Chicago Caged Bird Club -- all very upsetting.

Yet Conzen -- whose focus is generally on loftier topics -- is fond of his alley anyway, and alleys in general.

"I love my own alley [because] it's a three-block alley. It's peculiar," said Conzen, who has a charming British comportment and wears dashing tweedy attire. He began a short tour with a stroll across his ivy-covered back yard and through his slender garage.

Alleys, Conzen said, are where "the routine aspect of daily life in all its cultural richness takes place," so it's possible to interpret his neighborhood without barging in on anyone.

"You could read all sorts of social geography into the fact that these people have their fence all the way out to the edge of the property," he said of a white picket barricade crammed against a utility pole.

"They grabbed as much as they possibly could."

And the livelihood of a couple of households was easily discernible: One fairly new-looking extension clearly belonged to a sculptor.

"If you stand back over here you can see that he's got perfect northern light in his studio there," said Conzen, as we peered through the artist's iron gate.

"That's where he does his artwork. . . . I've never actually seen it, and I don't know his name."

We headed west, past a diverse collection of back fences and walls -- impressive wrought iron, thick concrete, antique brick and flimsy prefab jobs -- and backyard structures from various eras, including a two-story coach house, put to various uses. One particularly large house had a garage that faced snobbishly inward rather than opening onto the alley -- "a suburban classic design," as Conzen put it. "And that's what fascinates me, because in an example like this -- and there are tons around Chicago --you've got the total mixture of different eras, of ideal urban living, all jostling cheek by jowl."

And you've got Conzen's bete noire, that sleeping policeman, which, for the record, is just a Britishism for a "speed bump," and is wrecking the suspension on his Volvo. "Here you have social conflict: The dog owners are in a different camp from the car drivers. Us car drivers feel that this is a garage-to-street space, and we don't walk our dogs [back here] . . . clearly you've got conflicting land use," he said with a laugh.

"But what is the city if it's not a great ball of competing and conflicting interests much of the time," he added. "That's what makes it so . . . interesting."